Believe it or not, and I’m not sure I do, there was some actual news about the Poolshed Papers case down in Florida, even though Judge Aileen Cannon has the case in the basement cooler next to the holiday hamburger and a supply of MAGA Rocket Pops. Back a year or so ago, the attorneys for the former president* made a bunch of motions before Judge Beryl Howell seeking to have the indictments regarding the Poolshed Papers dismissed for... reasons. This did not go well for the former president*’s side. From Politico:
In her 87-page opinion, Howell said the likelihood that Trump committed crimes was a basis to permit special counsel Jack Smith to question the former president’s attorney Evan Corcoran on topics that would normally be shielded by attorney-client privilege. Prosecutors, Howell said, had demonstrated that Trump knew Corcoran had been tasked in June 2022 with informing the government that all classified materials had been returned, “a representation that the former president … knew to be wrong.”
The FBI’s August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago confirmed that dozens of other classified documents remained on the property—but as Howell notes, there were at least two more rounds of classified materials found on Trump’s property following additional searches.
Throughout the opinion, Howell—who was chief judge of the Washington, D.C. federal district court at the time—described with varying degrees of incredulity how four documents with classification markings could have been discovered in Trump’s private quarters months after prosecutors had subpoenaed them and the FBI conducted its own exhaustive search of the property.
Howell’s opinion was unsealed this week, and its undeniable subtext is that Jack Smith and his prosecutors have far more evidence to support their charges than was previously suspected. From The Washington Post:
Buried in the supporting documentation for one of the motions was a document that contained a new public revelation: Once Trump realized that security cameras at Mar-a-Lago could capture his employees moving classified government information that officials were attempting to retrieve, he allegedly ensured that they would avoid the cameras when moving boxes. The detail suggests prosecutors have more evidence of alleged obstruction by Trump than they included in their criminal indictment—a situation that is not unusual in criminal cases.
The newly unsealed filing does not provide many details about Trump’s directives to his employees. It says Trump’s lawyer informed him in a June 2022 call that the government had issued a subpoena seeking surveillance footage at Mar-a-Lago, setting in motion a scramble to ensure that any future movement of boxes would avoid video detection.
“The government has provided sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the June 24, 2022 phone call may have furthered the former president’s efforts to obstruct the government’s investigation,” Howell’s opinion reads.
If we’re all lucky, and if Jesus is still our pal, the newly unsealed opinion will increase the pressure on Judge Cannon to get off the dime and act like an actual judge. It certainly is strong evidence that justice will be better served if this case is removed from her courtroom.
In related news, in Georgia, Fulton County DA Fani Willis easily won the Democratic nomination for another term.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
